Alright, America. Let's talk about economics, labor-theft, wages, big-donor lobbying, why billionaires exist, and why they should not. If any of this stuff has baffled you, I hope this clears it up. https://twitter.com/BashingInMinds/status/1285323203099922435

If you're through that primer, I want to illustrate how these topics intersect with other major points of contention in the United States right now. Each reply I drop on this thread will be its own thread.

Alright, America. Let's talk about institutional racism and police.

You may have heard people bring up the connections between police, private property, and racism, and those concepts may not have seemed obvious at first. To break this down, the first thing you need to do is understand the origins of modern policing.

American police got their start as slave-catchers, and were quickly modeled around the UK's metropolitan police, who were formed to suppress protests and riots over poor working conditions/low wages without creating martyrs (injure, cripple, maim, but don't murder, basically).

You will see shades of this in how our modern police operate. Numerous journalists have lost their eyes or suffered other horrendous issues for even having the gall to cover the BLM protests. If you haven't been following it, there's ongoing coverage here https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1284526898991828992

This brutality is not a mistake, or some aberration of the system. It is working precisely as intended; the goal is to terrorize the populace into complacency. Our police have a notoriously terrible crime-solve rate, poor response times, etc., - because those are secondary.

Their primary purpose has always been to keep workers in line and prevent popular uprising. At first, this meant suppressing the slaves (who are, I should remind you, a working class); once slavery was partially abolished (prison slavery excepted), they focused on other workers.

This brings us to the topic of institutional racism. The mechanism of police subjugation is only effective when people are insufficiently organized and united in purpose to overwhelm the police; thus, a divide-and-conquer solution is employed along various metrics.

This includes fomenting racial tensions, religious conflict, cultural conflicts (including liberal vs conservative, men vs women, LGBT vs straight, etc.,)

This tactic is at least as old as the Roman Empire, and it's not going anywhere soon.

By ensuring that the working class continues to bear animosity and distrust for each other, the wealthy classes help to ensure that no effective political action is taken to threaten their power structure. This is why signs of racial tension translate to DOW hikes.

Over time, people have become far better at organizing, thanks in large part to the Internet. As a result, police budgets have had to skyrocket, taking up majorities and supermajorities of major city budgets. This is not to fight crime whatsoever.

Any self-respecting and credible scholar of criminology can easily find proof that the best crime-reduction strategies involve improving living conditions for the poor, and would see massive increases in social services and social workers, rather than more militarized cops.

This is what's meant when people say 'defund the police'; they are agitating for the funding to be taken AWAY from the police and put INTO social services that ACTUALLY reduce violence.

Wealthy donors are fighting this tooth and nail, because it reduces their wage influence.

It's the same basic concept as what I brought up in the labor-theft thread; the more social services are offered, the less reliant on corporations the populace becomes. So they will always oppose such things where they are able (aside from services that benefit them like busses)

So when you see police beating the shit out of peaceful protesters, suppressing free speech, blinding journalists with rubber bullets, or hear about the events of Tulsa and Rosewood, remember:

These are not bugs. This is exactly what the police were founded to do and permit.

If you want to learn more about police brutality and abuse, definitely check out this thread by @RealSteveCox. He doesn't mince words or talk BS. https://twitter.com/RealSteveCox/status/1266243977528799232